Quotes of the day

posted at 8:15 pm on July 4, 2012 by Allahpundit

The assumption of natural rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence can be summed up by the following proposition: “first comes rights, then comes government.” According to this view: (1) the rights of individuals do not originate with any government, but preexist its formation; (2) The protection of these rights is the first duty of government; and (3) Even after government is formed, these rights provide a standard by which its performance is measured and, in extreme cases, its systemic failure to protect rights — or its systematice violation of rights — can justify its alteration or abolition; (4) At least some of these rights are so fundamental that they are “inalienable,” meaning they are so intimately connected to one’s nature as a human being that they cannot be transferred to another even if one consents to do so. This is powerful stuff.

***

By 1776, the Atlantic Ocean had become what one historian has called “an information highway” across which poured books, magazines, newspapers and copies of the debates in Parliament. The latter were read by John Adams, George Washington, Robert Morris and other politically minded men. They concluded that the British were planning to tax the Americans into the kind of humiliation that Great Britain had inflicted on Ireland.

History confirmed his intuition. In the next hundred years, other nations and peoples would issue 200 similar declarations.

***

But then came the late 1960s, and over the next two decades American individualism was fully unleashed. A kind of tacit grand bargain was forged between the counterculture and the establishment, between the forever-young and the moneyed.

Going forward, the youthful masses of every age would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes or social opprobrium.

“Do your own thing” is not so different than “every man for himself.” If it feels good, do it, whether that means smoking weed and watching porn and never wearing a necktie, retiring at 50 with a six-figure public pension and refusing modest gun regulation, or moving your factories overseas and letting commercial banks become financial speculators. The self-absorbed “Me” Decade, having expanded during the ’80s and ’90s from personal life to encompass the political economy, will soon be the “Me” Half-Century.

People on the political right have blamed the late ’60s for what they loathe about contemporary life — anything-goes sexuality, cultural coarseness, multiculturalism. And people on the left buy into that, seeing only the ’60s legacies of freedom that they define as progress. But what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967. Thanks to the ’60s, we are all shamelessly selfish.

***

Little by little, the home of the brave and the land of the free has become a nation of rent-seeking dependents clamoring for their share of state largess. Even before the latest entitlement blowout called Obamacare, we crossed the line where more than half of Americans receive some kind of assistance from the government every month, paid for by the fewer than half that still pay income taxes. As we move into the future and the number of dependents grows while the taxpayer pool shrinks, we call the result social justice rather than its old name: theft.

Our forefathers shed blood rather than render unto King George. Yet today we madly mortgage our nation’s future to foreign powers, piling debt upon debt without limit or thought as to how it will be repaid. These debts ensnare our children and grandchildren even as we stop having them, confident in the knowledge that the government will take care of us in our old age, so why bother with the trouble and expense?

If we were still a nation capable of shame with enough intellectual integrity to call things as they are, if we hadn’t debauched our language as badly as our currency, if we had the courage to look in the mirror and see how woefully we have squandered our Founders’ legacy, this Fourth of July would be a day not of celebration but of atonement.

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Come back from a walk and decided that this is a Personal Independence Day. I have decided to go Galt.

From a book I read:

“People driven by success are rarely satisfied, no matter how high they climb-no accomplishment gives lasting satisfaction. Whenever they reach one level of success, they imagine yet another, higher level. The income they once dreamed of now looks like a starvation salary. It comes down to this: people who equate happiness with success will never achieve enough success to be happy. They’re like Sisyphus, interminably pushing a rock up a hill. Ironically, Sisyphus’s only period of happiness was probably that short moment when the rock was rolling down-when he wasn’t pushing, when he had time for self-reflection.”

Good for you. I went semi-Galt (even before I knew “Who is John Galt” … Reading Atlas Shrugged was like reading my own thoughts, except with railroads and an amazing motor) 21 years ago, and Full Galt when they nominated McCain.

Richard Henry Lee, a delegate from Virginia, had introduced the resolution to adopt the Declaration of Independence in June of 1776. He was prophetic in his concluding remarks:

“Why then sir, why do we longer delay? Why still deliberate? Let this happy day give birth to an American Republic. Let her arise not to devastate and to conquer but to reestablish the reign of peace and law. The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us. She demands of us a living example of freedom that may exhibit a contrast in the felicity of the citizen to the ever increasing tyranny which desolates her polluted shores. She invites us to prepare an asylum where the unhappy may find solace, and the persecuted repost. If we are not this day wanting in our duty, the names of the American Legislatures of 1776 will be placed by posterity at the side of all of those whose memory has been and ever will be dear to virtuous men and good citizens.”

Sure is!! My lil ole air conditioner has been running non-stop for over a week. $$$$$

bluealice on July 4, 2012 at 8:47 PM

It was horrible out there today. Started golfing at 10 a.m. and all of us were near collapse by the end. No amount of water, shade, or rest was enough. I came home and laid down on the bed, promptly fell asleep for three hours and woke up feeling as dehydrated as I’ve felt in some time.

But then came the late 1960s, and over the next two decades American individualism was fully unleashed. A kind of tacit grand bargain was forged between the counterculture and the establishment, between the forever-young and the moneyed.

Dang those people over at the NYT are both stupid and ignorant of history. There was great expansion in thought and inventiveness before the 60′s when the liberals writing at the NYT were apparently semi-conscious. That was nothing but a bunch of strawmen trying to justify the damage that those idiots did to the country during the 60′s, now coming home to roost. When you look at the author’s bio, it all comes clear, he was a rich man’s son who was ashamed of success. Apparently didn’t read much history either; IIRC Rockefeller, Gould, Hearst, and the others who showed extravagance with their wealth came before the 1960′s. Yeah, he got the last sentence right too, he is a preachy liberal communist fool.

That’s right, every time I see a cigarette smoking, tattoed up, scraggly, overweight, professional baby maker, getting out of their car in a handicap space, talkin on their free Obama phone, I want to say have you no SHAME, grab the thing from their hands and stomp it to smithereens while saying, “there I paid for it with the money I didn’t spend on tattoos, cigarettes,fast food, booze and drugs so its mine and you can’t have it anymore!
Or just stop at have you no shame!

These men knew what they risked. The penalty for treason was death by hanging. And remember: a great British fleet was already at anchor in New York Harbor.

They were sober men. There were no dreamy-eyed intellectuals or draft card burners here. They were far from hot-eyed fanatics, yammering for an explosion. They simply asked for the status quo. It was change they resisted. It was equality with the mother country they desired. It was taxation with representation they sought. They were all conservatives, yet they rebelled.

It was principle, not property, that had brought these men to Philadelphia. Source

I watched The Patriot on Netflix.
We are screwed, but not as screwed as we were in 1776.
the new aesthetic on July 4, 2012 at 8:18 PM

No. We are worse off than they. They at least were engaged in a struggle within the framework of a Biblical worldview. Our struggle is between what’s left of that perspective and it’s antithesis.

The writer for the New York Times has inadvertently swerved into it although he can’t seem to make the connection as to the source of the change – the rejection, as a culture, of the Biblical framework from which this country’s principles were derived.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness?”

… and “Taxes” “Penalties”, don’t forget the “Taxes” “Penalties” if you don’t participate in a government mandated behavior.

Oh, and “Debt”, you can’t forget “Debt”, to the tune of +$16 Trillion and growing…

… but don’t worry about that, the only thing that truly counts is if the New York Times likes you.

The concept of “unalienable rights” is only possible in a construct that involves deity. In a purely material construct, there are no such things as “rights” except if you want to concede that people are allowed to grant these to each other… but even then, there is no such thing as a right that cannot be abridged if people decide it can be abridged. Nothing is unalienable in that construct.

Just saw an ad from Americans for Prosperity. In the 30 second spot they hit Obama 3 or 4 times for sticking Americans with the largest tax increase in history after he had promised he wouldn’t raise taxes.

Damn, AP, that’s a good one. Mark Levin had a caller last night who wished him a “happy Dependence Day.” Oy! Cheers! and Happy July 4th to you and your loved ones.

minnesoter on July 4, 2012 at 9:26 PM

Before you leave, you seem to be confused about the QOTD. They are not written by Allah. They are a culmination of snippets from different articles around the internet. Clicking on the links will take you to the entire article.

Yes, and no. Our real enemy today is domestic, so therefore more insidious. Much like de Tocqueville predicted.
However, we haven’t come close to the sacrifice our forefathers gave. Those men gave it all. Most of us are just whining on the internet.
TitularHead on July 4, 2012 at 9:15 PM

True. But do you understand why I say we are worse off?

If they had lost, the basis upon which they determined what was true or false in human conduct and a proper social system would have remained intact and more than likely they would have eventually prevailed. Just as slavery HAD to come to an end given the moral consensus of their day, so the usurpations of their individual rights eventually would have given way to the liberties we now enjoy.

But if WE lose, the very basis upon which we interpret reality is threatened. That is what is really at stake here. Although she was rigidly anti-religious, Ayn Rand saw that the enemy we face is a Hegelian/ Kantian Collectivist mentality which hates that which is right and true.

It is not merely a political struggle we are engaged in but a spiritual one which manifests itself in the political.

Now thats an ad! short, sweet voice, telling the story, those read only things to music are a waste of money! people are not that engaged, those read only ads are like junk mail, or phone solicitations, history, annoying, more damage than good.

“My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off if you’re gonna be better off if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” – FORWARD

It was change they resisted. It was equality with the mother country they desired. It was taxation with representation they sought. They were all conservatives, yet they rebelled.

It was principle, not property, that had brought these men to Philadelphia. Source

Flora Duh on July 4, 2012 at 9:02 PM

There is a lesson in there for the libs; they have pushed too far. Look where we’ve gone:

1) The founders empowered Congress to regulate interstate commerce. They clearly meant this to be regulating the actual commerce as it was crossing state lines and prohibiting the states from doing so. They had just dealt with all the problems of the Federation of States where states were putting tariffs on goods crossing their borders with other states.

Then we moved to the New Deal era
2) The federal government now started regulating the goods that would be crossing the state lines, most notably how much of those goods could be produced. Thus the agricultural allotments were born, regulating how much wheat, corn, or soybeans could be grown on an individual farmer’s land because wheat, corn, and soybeans were used in interstate commerce.

Which gave rise to the absolutely horrible wickard vs. filburn decision in which it was determined that
3) A farmer, raising wheat on his own land to feed his own chickens, wheat that would never leave the confines of his own land and possibly, the chickens may not have left the boundaries of his own land either, was engaged in interstate commerce because the wheat that he was raising could have been raised by someone in another state and that by raising his own wheat, this farmer was possibly depriving a farmer in another state of the ability to sell his grain. Therefore, because wheat was found to be an interstate commodity because it was traded across state lines, the government could therefore regulate not just the traffic of wheat across state lines, but production of wheat within state boundaries and now could regulate the production of wheat on an individuals farm even though that wheat would never leave the boundaries of that individual farm.

We then graduated to the government being able to regulate
4) The kind, types and characteristics of automobiles or other goods being produced anywhere because those goods would cross state lines as commerce

We now have the case where the government asserts
5) The right to regulate the production of various emissions within a state because those emissions might cross state boundaries

And finally, that gives rise to the latest usurpation of liberty:
6) The government can now tell citizens that they must engage in commerce of a specific kind or will be subject to a penalty tax for failing to have done so.

… and what exactly led to the first Declaration of Independence and American r.e.v.o.l.ution?

November is crucial; if we don’t win in November, then the options before us are even more bleak